Tuesday, July 06, 2004

For those of you who got an early break on the holiday weekend, here's
a brief list of Dubya's crew's propaganda points which seem to have
started fraying at the edges...

The widely-played shot of a crowd in Baghdad pulling down the
statue of Saddam in Baghdad's Firdos Square has been exposed
as a staged event, instigated and controlled by American officers.
(I might add that this is the point where the views of the al-Jazeera
reporters in Control Room -- the documentary you must see if you
already knew all that stuff Moore was talking about in Fahrenheit 9/11
-- diverge most from the consensus American media picture, as it
emerged at the time. Good on them).

Then there's the case of the terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, who the
Pentagon has cited lately as a main cog in the Iraqi resistance. And
(surprise!) nobody has any reason to doubt that. But Zarqawi's been
causing trouble for a while -- he was cited by Dubya as part of the
reason for going to war, even though we knew where he was, and it was
in a part of Iraq where our air force was denying Saddam control. And
given all that, people are asking why we didn't attack Zarqawi before
the war. Jim Miklaszewski claims that the
Pentagon had plans to do exactly that -- and that three separate
times, Dubya's national security council killed the plan because "the
administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could
undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy(!) has been digging into the
story. His reluctant conclusion: it
holds up, and the official denials don't:

The character of that official denial seems to be: unless
we had 100% certainty that Zarqawi himself was in the camp at any
given moment, the failure to attack is not an oddity requiring
explanation.

That's as contrasted with the much lower standard of proof demanded
for the "decapitation" bombing raids on buildings where somebody
thought they overheard something in a tea shop about Saddam maybe
being there sometime this week -- raids on civilian areas (as opposed
to, say, isolated armed camps in the desert) which killed dozens of
innocents each.

Major General Janis Karpinski, former head of detention operations
at Abu Ghraib, says Rumsfeld did
too approve "interrogation" techniques that violate any reasonable
interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. And she's also got a lot of
other things to say about, among other things, Israeli interrogators
at Abu Ghraib, and plans to detain the poor zhlubs at Guantanamo,
without trial, forever:

One of the members of [Gen. Miller's Guantanamo] team was a JAG
officer, a lawyer from down there. And I said to her ? she was a
lieutenant colonel, I believe ? and I said to her, "You know, we're
having problems with releasing some of these prisoners. What are you
doing?" And she said, "Oh, we're not releasing anybody." And I said,
"What's going to be the end state?" And she said, "Most of these
prisoners will never leave Guantanamo Bay. They'll spend the rest of
their lives in detention." And I said, "How do they get visits from
home?" She said, "These are terrorists, ma'am. They're not entitled to
visitors from home."

The Israeli bit is one of these things which people are accustomed
to call an explosive charge -- except, like the Abu Ghraib photos
themselves, it might conceivably have less of an effect than Americans
would expect because the Iraqis themselves already knew.

Incidentally, Karpinski has obvious personal motives for trying to
pin the blame on higher-ups, but even so, in what universe is a
U.S. military officer making claims like this in public not a
story that anything calling itself a news bulleting should shout from
the rooftops?